Peace and Clean Floors

Salem at the Carmelite Monestary in Niagara Falls.

People go to stay in the guest houses of monasteries and convents (in surprisingly large numbers) to absorb an atmosphere of 'peace'; it is a break from the conflict and tension, a move into another world from which strain is supposedly absent. The world of the cloister is one in which some new level of awareness has been attained, and its inhabitants breathe a different air. And we less fortunate (or less committed), are briefly admitted into it, for our nourishment and refreshment.
. . .
The popular concept of the peace of the cloister, like the glib misunderstandings of the Buddha's contemplation, is a damaging error - damaging of the people who hold it, damaging to those onto whom it is projected. It encourages most of us to think of peace as something intrinsically separate from the hard and familiar world, something we cannot expect to see realized in most of the reality we know: and it demands the impossible from the cloister, increasing tenfold the real and heavy pressures of that life.
. . .
God's peace has something to do with an acceptance of God's world in its complexity.

This is taken from Rowan Williams' The Truce of God. Whenever I am in one of those 'peaceful places' like the image above I tend to look at the floors and see how clean they are. Floors that clean do not come from a natural spirituality. The peace that comes in being able to perform that duty and create that space is a hard fought peace indeed always on the verge of descent.
I had not read anything by Williams in a while. This little book is a good reminder of his basic premise that heresy is the tendency towards simplification.

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The Only Offensive

From this morning's sermon,

It has often been noted that the armour described [in Ephesians 6] is not meant for offensive attack. There is no spear, bow, or long sword. The equipment described assumes close and intimate contact. It is interesting that the only piece of equipment used for any sort of offence is the sword of the Spirit which is the word of God. We often make truth or righteousness or even salvation as the sword we wield. We try to outdo our opponents in disputes over truth. We claim victory in our acts of righteousness. Or we divide people over our claims about salvation. Instead of offensive weapons Paul describes these things as gifted to us, that we take up and dress ourselves in. This sword of the Spirit is also mentioned in the book of Hebrews where it says, “For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. Nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.”
And so even this one offensive object is something we ourselves can never master or control but is something that we allow to work on ourselves as much as others. When we allow the sword of the Spirit, the word of God, free movement it shifts from being the crusaders sword to the surgeon’s scalpel and the priest’s sacrificial knife able to make cuts and incisions that work for healing and wholeness.

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Peace in Unpeaceful Places

[Excerpts from this morning's sermon]

God gives the Ten Commandments to Moses on Mt. Sinai which is somewhere in the desert between Egypt and Canaan. The giving of God’s law happens between the place of slavery under foreign power in Egypt and the giving of land and control to the Israelites in Canaan. The place of Mt. Sinai and the giving of the law is not insignificant. God’s law is given outside of the context of any human control or authority. Laws and rules work in our society and with our children because we are somehow able to enforce them through our authority. God’s laws, however, are not given through any institution. Samuel Balentine writes this of the location of Mt. Sinai. “[T]he location of Sinai is finally indeterminate; it lies in the wilderness somewhere between Egypt and Canaan. This elusiveness functions in [the Hebrew] tradition as a symbol of both Yahweh’s freedom and Yahweh’s authority. Like Sinai, Yahweh’s authority is not confined by, indeed may stand in opposition to, the sovereignty claimed by any earthly kingdom.” The authority of God’s law in the Old Testament ultimately lies in the presence of God alone.
. . .
It is God’s presence then that becomes important for understanding the Ten Commandments and how they might lead towards peace. If peace is to be found in God’s presence then it can only be experienced in a place like Sinai, in a place outside boundaries of human power and authority. This is why right after the Ten Commandments and other laws were given we read that God called Moses up to the mountain again were he was given instructions on how to build the Tabernacle. God says, “Make a sanctuary for me, and I will dwell among them.” And in the heart of the Tabernacle was the Holy of Holies where there was an empty space reserved for God. God said, “There, above the cover between the two cherubim that are over the ark of Testimony, I will meet with you and give you all my commands for the Israelites. The Tabernacle functioned as a sort of portable Mt. Sinai. The people of God were always to carry with them a space reserved for God alone; a space that was not influenced or controlled by any individual or group.
. . .
What then does the law have to do with peace? We often assume that following these commands will lead to peace within ourselves and peace with our neighbours. There is an extent to which that is true. But if we look at the structure of this passage something more significant emerges. We find that the people witnessing this event on either end of the Ten Commandments are trembling with fear. As God meets Moses on the mountain the people witness smoke, fire, thunder, lighting and earthquakes. The people are not yet prepared to enter the presence of God and so they roped off at the foot of the mountain. Then after Moses brings the Ten Commandments to the people it says that “when the people saw the thunder and lightening and heard the trumpet and saw the mountain in smoke, they trembled in fear. They stayed at a distance and said to Moses, ‘Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die.’” When God’s commands come to us they shake our foundations. They search out our thoughts and actions sitting in judgment on them. They force us into confrontation with our neighbour as we attempt to throw down the idols within and around us. If they are allowed into us these commands leave us trembling, vulnerable and at the mercy of God. They leave us in the wilderness in the space of Mt. Sinai where no one can claim power and status. According to the text it is then, and only then, as we enter into the commands from either side, the commands to love God and to love our neighbour that we encounter something in the centre.
For those of you who were counting I have left out one commandment. It is at the centre of the commandments. It is at the place where the love of God and love of neighbour meet.

Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labour and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

This the heart of the commandments and the place of peace. This is where God is honoured and neighbour is loved. After the commands have searched us out and we have trembled before them as they overturned our idols and desires then we are able to receive peace from God and peace with all those who gather in this place. This is Sabbath. The place of peace is a place of the worship. We gather each Sunday so that in some real way we can enact and honour Sabbath and this way live at the heart of the commands. This was God’s call on Moses. God called Moses to lead a kingdom of priests and a holy nation; a kingdom not of kings and generals but of saints, a nation not ruled by war and economics but by right relationships with God.
As we leave from here we are called to overthrow the idols of our culture and undermine the national foundations of wealth and power. We leave knowing that as the Tabernacle was a portable place to live with God’s presence now our bodies are the temple of God’s Spirit. Our bodies carry the place where God met with Moses on Mt. Sinai. The Spirit searches us and shakes us until we let go of control and fear and misdirected desires. The Spirit moves in us so that others also might tremble as their idols are exposed. The Spirit empowers us so those who suffer under the powers and idols of the world may find rest. The Spirit carries us so that we might travel to heart of God. This is the place of Sabbath. This is the place of peace where are passions find fulfillment and our fears are healed. May we not be afraid at God’s commands for though they are often not peaceful they are indeed the way to peace.

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Getting Up on My Soap-Box

Hineini asks the question in Attack on Sanctuary,

Do you feel you are entitled as a pastor to ask your congregants to give up their safety? I'm not sure this is a fair question really but I'm curious on your take. I like the idea of sanctuary and abhore the idea of violence but, for me, part of the idea of sanctuary is that God will provide protection and I'm not seeing much of that anytime lately so I'm wondering if its time to rethink things....

This is definitely a two-part question. First is the role preaching or perhaps even education or transformation more generally. This Advent season represents the close of my first full year of preaching. Most of my sermons up until about a month ago were centered around particular images that I thought would be evoking and generative for people's lives. Very little came off as prescriptive. I did not offer a very specific 'application' for my sermons. In my mind I probably still favour this approach. However, my temperament is to be a little avoident and so I suspect this type of preaching flows from here.
Something happened in reflecting on the texts for my first sermon in Advent. Paul says to the church in Rome that it is time for them to 'wake from their slumber.' This passage roused my own thinking and challenged me in what a church responding to the Gospel should look like. I saw this call as re-focusing on the simple but encompassing love for our neighbour. The OT text was Isaiah 2 and I preached on the surrounding passages that spoke of leveling of all those lifted themselves up on high hills, which I interpreted as isolating yourself from your neighbour. I spoke these words,

Being awake means being aware of your neighbour. St. Antony the monk once wrote, “Our life and our death is with our neighbour. If we win our neighbour, we win God. If cause our neighbour to stumble, we have sinned against Christ.” This is similar to Isaiah’s criticism.
Now then, listen, you lover of pleasure,
lounging in your security
and saying to yourself,
'I am, and there is none besides me.'

We need to know our neighbour so that we can know Christ. If we do not listen to our neighbour we will doze off to sleep again.

And in conclusion,

Christ came to establish the mountain of God above all other hills and so our calling is to come down from our individual high hills and journey to the mountain of God where justice and wisdom flow. This Christmas season we will not see Christ if we remain on our high hills. We must come down and gather together first in the valley as it will lead to the mountain of God. And then gathered together there we can make way for the saviour who has come, who is present among us and who will come again. We make way for Christ in our minds and in our actions. We make way for Christ as he comes in our neighbours. This Christmas season we are called to make a place Christ in our homes and in our lives. Keep watch and stay alert in this age because Paul tells us that our salvation is nearer now then when we first believed. The night is nearly over. The day is almost here. Stay awake. Keep watch in faith and journey with your neighbour in the valley and in the storm as we travel with Christ to the mountain of God.
Amen.

This is strong language for my style of preaching and it continued into my sermon for the 3rd Sunday in Advent (Isaiah 35; Luke 1:47-55; Matthew 11:2-11), which moves into the second part of the question, Do you feel you are entitled as a pastor to ask your congregants to give up their safety?
I was moved by the presence and use of lethal force by armed guards at New Life Church in Colorado and decided that would be my base image for my last sermon. In that sermon I focused on the context, more so that the specific content, of the texts for that Sunday. For both Isaiah's ministry and first-century Palestine the question of deliverance and freedom were open. I admitted in the sermon that other passages could be used to respond to the question of violence but that "our passages here are clear and unequivocal in their rejection of the world’s use of force." Isaiah condemns those who look to Egypt for help and points to Hezekiah's faithful act of trust that delivers Jerusalem (for the time being). Jesus overturns the popular notion of Messiah as people anticipated and rallied around heroic characters who rose and fell at that time.
And I concluded the sermon with the following statements,

Seeing and receiving Christ means being outside of the world’s power and following Christ mean walking daily in the rejection and overturning of those powers. This is why the image of armed guards at church remains so unnerving. It is perhaps possible to agree that the use of force can restrain certain events from happening. We can be thankful that the incident in Colorado did get any worse that it did. But we need to remember that this incident is not unlike another incident in the U.S. On September 11 2001 a group of extremists attacked what citizens saw as the sanctuary of their homeland. It was believed that quick and decisive action would bring about peace and justice to the situation. The world’s force only offers the possibility of restraint. Contrary to Churchill’s statement there is no promise of peace when rough men stand ready to do violence. The U.S. is not a place of peace because they have largest and most powerful military. And here in Canada we must beware of the extant to which we profit from the military strength at home and in the U.S. In these realms there is no vision of desert flowers bursting into bloom. We must individually and communally navigate and respond to conflict and brokenness around us asking ourselves if we will attempt to restrain force with force or if we will, in faith, open up a way in the desert.
In our aid the Gospel gives at least one response to a violent attack on the church. That is a response to an attack on the body of Christ, which is the church. In the Garden of Gethsemane towards the end of his ministry Jesus and his followers are approached by a mob wielding clubs and swords coming to arrest Jesus. In defence one of those with Jesus strikes out with his sword and cuts the ear of the servant of the high priest but before the violence escalates Jesus intervenes and speaks to the reality of God’s world saying, “Put your sword back in its place. For all who draw the sword will die by the sword. Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?” God and God’s Kingdom is not threatened with the world’s force. The mountain of God rises up on a different foundation. That foundation comes to us weak and vulnerable as a child. This is our story in the Christmas season. This is must be our story the year as it carries us towards Easter. This must become the story of our life because this is the only place where God promises peace. And from that place a way opens up where justice comes from unlikely places like flowers in the desert bursting into bloom.
Amen.

What I emphasized was that there is no promise of peace or justice through the means of the world's power and force. I hoped that here I would walk a line between overt prescription and vague moralism. Did I ask my congregation to give up their safety? Not really, I suppose. What I said was that there is no promise of safety (peace) through the medium of force. A community of non-violence must be voluntary community. This falls off the radar quickly in churches without an historic peace stance. It did for me in my time away from the Mennonite church. It is becoming more and more pressing as I allow it to intentionally emerge from the Gospel.
I see this question also opening into the larger arena of education and transformation. What challenges me is preaching such a sermon and then living with and among my congregation and wondering if and how change is possible through such mediums. I am sure this is the perennial challenge of professors and teachers as well.
Any thoughts, comments, reflections on the roles of preaching, transformation or peace and violence?

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Peace and Palm Sunday

Here is an excerpt from my Palm Sunday sermon. I hope it makes sense on its own.

Our world essentially offers one model of peace, it is the peace achieved either through victory or ironically through victimhood. In either scenario the peace we seek is simply the ability to be insulated and protected from any unwanted contact. As the victor we try to overwhelm the source of conflict and impose order on it as the United States continues to attempt in Iraq. In relationships we use our status or authority or manipulation to impose our way in times of conflict. And strangely enough we also often use the role of victimhood to attempt to overcome conflict. To be classified as a victim can absolve us of facing any criticism. In relationships if we can convince the other person that they are evil then we may debilitate their influence on us.

Now I want to be clear that this has nothing to do with someone who is the victim of abuse. In these instances the victim should be protected from the abuser. What I am referring to is how we use the role of victim to keep ourselves from meaningful, constructive relationships. Ultimately we all need to open up to someone in a meaningful way.

In both positions change or growth becomes difficult because differing voices are no longer heard, they have been effectively silenced. Chris Heubner writes that “the culture of victimhood simply reproduces the same logic of power as that of victory, namely a competition for security and control. Put differently, the hero and victim are both expressions of a desire to escape difficulty.” In both of these scenarios peace cannot be established because peace requires right relationships and these positions choke out the possibility of meaningful relationships.

When we receive Christ like the crowds did on Palm Sunday we often assume both positions. Out of a position of being victimized we, like the people, call on Jesus to enter as our victor and overcome our enemies dramatically and decisively.
Then we often become offended when Jesus does not put people in their place. And then we are even more offended when Jesus implies that perhaps we may have some things to work on.

The reality of Christ’s peace enters when we discard our attempts to preserve our lives, our attempts to impose order through the position of either victor or victim. The peace of Christ assumes that it is in fact our very lives that become the medium for peace. We do not create peace we receive, become, and then offer peace.

The extreme example we are given is this that of the martyr. I am not using the term martyr as it is commonly used today when we say that someone is making themselves a martyr. That is the definition of victim that I used earlier. Indeed Huebner writes that “one cannot designate oneself a martyr.” Also I am not assuming that a martyr is necessarily someone who dies for their faith. Rather, and I think this important, the martyr is someone who give their life for their faith.
The martyr does not enter into conflict in order to play by its rules. A martyr can do this because her identity is not defined by or dependent on the instability of the conflicting beliefs, practices or relationships that surround her. A martyr does not use the practices or materials of conflict to overcome conflict.
This is the call to be in the world but not of the world.

Being of the world means allowing Christ to remain as an icon to grace our wall. Christ the icon remains still and static passively accepting the role that we give to him allowing us to use our own means to accomplish our tasks.
Being in the world but not of it means being on the watch for a Jesus who comes on his donkey receives our welcome and continues to move on. It is in his passing through that we are confronted with the question of understanding what will bring us peace.

Here we are reminded of a parable that Jesus tried to prepare us with. This is the story of the king who gave his servants some money and then went away. When the king came back he only scolded the servant who did nothing with his money except try to protect it. The money given to the servants represents their lives. We cannot keep our lives and so we only have the choice of either trying to protect our lives or of investing, of giving our lives. Ironically enough this is the parable that Luke leads into Jesus’s entry on a donkey.
We know what it is to give our lives to our work or our family but to give our lives for Christ is to participate in something earlier, something deeper than the violence of world. It is to return, at least in part, to peace of creation. But first we must follow Jesus this Easter. Follow him and his donkey as he moves through us this Palm Sunday.
Follow him to the Last Supper where gives us the image and command of service to one another.
Follow him into the Garden of Gethsemane where he too wrestles with his own human understanding and his divine calling.
Follow, perhaps only at distance, to the hill of skulls on Good Friday where Jesus confronts the ultimate violence of death.
Watch for him on Easter Saturday as he prepares his return.
Celebrate him Easter Sunday and invite the peace of God in our midst.

Lord have mercy,
Amen

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